Faith film hopes for '2016' success

The success of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “2016: Obama’s America” seems to be disproving the notion that conservative films don’t make for good box office, and another film hopes to do likewise.

Veritas Entertainment’s “Last Ounce of Courage,” directed by Kevin McAfee (“Beyond the Gates of Splendor,” “The End of the Spear”) and starring Marshall Teague (“Roadhouse”) and Jennifer O’Neill (“Summer of ‘42”), portrays a father who takes “a stand for faith and freedom against a tide of apathy and vanishing liberty.”

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The film is being billed as bipartisan, although Veritas Entertainment President Steve Griffin concedes that it’s likely to be pigeonholed.

“People will bill it as right leaning and I don’t know why that is,” said Griffin, noting the film’s military backdrop and themes of faith and small government. “I think people would think Democrats love God as much as Republicans love God.”

“We were honored to have that,” said Griffin, who said the movie had a profound affect on the actor. “When he saw the film, it affected him emotionally.… He had tears in his eyes.”

Despite the success of “2016,” Griffin doesn’t think it marks the beginning of a golden age of conservative films.

“I don’t agree that the waters are warmer. I think the waters are always warm if you have a good story and you can resonate with Americans who have a core value system. It’s just what’s been made available to them. … If you look at the top grossing films, they’re not all R-rated. They’re PG and PG-13 rated. I think you can tell a story like Hollywood used to tell it without gratuitous sex and naked body parts and bad language. … I think the audience is always hungry for those type of films. It’s just not popular and edgy and Hollywood-ish, but Hollywood used to be that way.”

“Last Ounce of Courage” stands more than a fighting chance over the weekend. “We had a goal of 1,200 screens and we’re opening in over 1,400 theaters across the country today, and that’s a record for a faith- or family-based film, outside of ‘Passion of the Christ.’”

Griffin said that screenwriter Darrel Campbell set out to write the film four years ago, originally as a film about Americans being unable to publicly celebrate Christmas, but that it took a different direction. Still, the theme of an intrusive government restricting faith remained.

“I think our freedoms as Americans — not just Christians — are at risk,” Griffin said. “In my lifetime, Christian Americans, for example, are still a majority of people in this country and we’re still pushed around and told what we can and cannot do and told we’re not politically correct. … It appears to me that we have people telling us what we can and cannot do.

“Our country was founded on ‘one nation, under God,’ and what happened with recent conventions” — the debate over the removal, and restoration, of “God” in the Democratic platform — “it seems like God is being pushed out of that,” he said.